All of the projects I am currently working on are targeting iOS 6, so I have used it as an opportunity to finally dive into the deep end with Auto Layout. Committed was my first foray with the technology on the Mac this summer when I laid out the preferences window using constraints rather than traditional springs and struts.

On a simple window like that with just a few tables views and buttons the experience is pretty straight forward. As I don’t have much experience with anything more complex on the Mac, I’ll refrain from commenting on that experience much more.

My focus the past few months has been on iOS where Apple introduced Auto Layout as part of the iOS 6 launch. Auto Layout is touted as being superior to the old springs and struts based layout styles because it allows building layouts that can scale to a variety of different screen sizes. Working on a platform with 3.5″, 4″, 7.9″ and 9.7″ devices? Sounds like a great technology to adopt!

The Learning Curve

Auto Layout has one of the steepest learning curves of any new technology I’ve worked with. There are at least three different things you need to keep track of on the basic level. Step one is wrapping your head around working with constraints in Interface Builder. Step two involves using the code-based NSLayoutConstraint, which includes the visual formatting language. Step three revolves around debugging and dealing with more advanced things like animation.

Even after a few months of using Auto Layout, I still don’t feel the level off comfort using the technology as I would with any previous ramp up I have had.

Interface Builder Is The New HAL 9000

Apple tends to recommend laying out constraints using Interface Builder whenever possible because it’s a bit easier to visualize what you are doing. Plus, who doesn’t prefer clicking buttons instead of typing more code?

What frustrates me about setting constraints with Interface Builder is its instance on adding more constraints automatically for me, even if I don’t want/need them. I’d love some sort of button or setting I can click to tell Interface Builder to back off and just let me handle everything.

The workaround I tend to have for these constraints I don’t really want or need is to set them with a lower priority (Radar: 12625299).

Debugging Ambiguous

I’ve had better luck trying to read women in my failed relationships than trying to debug why my constraints aren’t working out. When working with a view in Interface Builder, I’d hope that it would be able to tell me that my layout was ambiguous before I went through the process of recompiling and running my application.

In the case of the primary project I’m working on right now, all the constraints are written in code, so the only recourse for debugging really is calling [self.view _autolayoutTrace]1 from LLDB. Calling _autolayoutTrace will give a breakdown of the hierarchy of your views and list any of them that have ambiguous constraints, but that’s it.

Great. I have view that’s ambiguous. Now what? A lot of trial, error, and tears usually. There’s a category on UIView called UIConstraintBasedLayoutDebugging that has three methods for trying to debug constraints, but it’s still far more trial and error debugging than was ever necessary with springs and struts.

OS X has an Instrument tool for working with constraints, but it’s not available for iOS. I’ve never used it, so I can’t speak to its benefits but in general any tool that makes debugging easier would be a win. (Radar: 12625327)

Ideally there would be a way to visualize constraints either on device or in the iOS simulator so see what constraints are affecting a specific view. NSWindow has something similar to its visualizeConstraints: call. I’d love to see that for iOS. (Radar: 12625312)

Documentation?

When something has such a steep learning curve as Auto Layout, you want to provide as much documentation and help as possible, especially if you want developers to adopt the technology.

In the case of Auto Layout, the best documentation isn’t in Apple’s official documentation. It isn’t in a book. It’s in three hours of WWDC 2012 videos. Seriously, if you are going to work with Auto Layout you should watch sessions 202, 228 and 232. And then watch them again.

The problem is that a lot of the information I find in these three hours of videos isn’t really replicated in the documentation. Like a lot of Apple documentation, it highlights the happy path of what you can do with Auto Layout, but leaves you to sink or swim once you get beyond that. The WWDC videos, on the other hand, handle a lot of those hairy edge cases and complexities you may run into when working on a product that is larger than demo size. Sample code on Apple’s side related to Auto Layout is also pretty sparse. Again, I’m a visual learner. (Radar: 12625370)

Animation

Animation is a core component of a modern OS X or iOS application. At a basic level, animation revolves around adjusting the frame of a view or adjusting its transform. With Auto Layout, the recommended way to do any sort of animation is to animate the constraints.

Animating constraints is a bigger pain in the ass than animating frames. You have to keep a strong reference to each constraint that you want to animate and usually either re-set the constraint or adjust its constant value depending on what you’re doing. I recently was trying to figure out how to zoom an Auto Layout-based view to fill the entire parent view that contains it. I uploaded a sample project to iOS with a solution to the problem, but I can’t help but feel like I had to write way more code to accomplish this than I ever would have the old way

I don’t really have a suggestion for a way to improve this. I just think it’s a pain point.

Despite the learning curve and the frustrations I have with Auto Layout in its current incarnation, I plan to continue to use it. Unlike something like bindings on OS X, I think they are a fundamental aspect of development going forward that will be difficult to avoid using.